Federal officers shot a 37-year-old US citizen dead in Minneapolis on Saturday, inflaming tensions in the city that has become a battleground in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
In a social media post, the governor Tim Walz said he had been in touch with the White House after the shooting and called on President Donald Trump to end the crackdown in his state. “Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now,” Walz said in a post on X.
The details surrounding the shooting weren’t immediately clear. Minneapolis’ chief of police Brian O’Hara described the victim as a white man and a resident of the city.
Protests have convulsed Minneapolis since the shooting of US citizen Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on 7 January. Hundreds of businesses closed and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in frigid weather on Friday demanding federal law enforcement leave the liberal Midwestern city.
Trump dispatched ICE agents to the city at the end of December as part of a sweeping crackdown on undocumented migrants that has caught up families and children.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says more than 3,000 “criminal illegal aliens” have been arrested in the city over the past six weeks as federal agents scour the city. Mugshots have been posted on social media of people arrested along with lurid details of alleged child sex crimes and gang offences.
But research by several independent organisations shows that most people detained for deportation are not violent criminals. Analysis last year by the Cato Institute found that 73% of those detained had no criminal convictions. The White House argues that being in the US without correct documentation automatically makes people criminals, but this is disputed by civil rights and legal experts.
Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino vowed on Friday to press ahead with the campaign, dubbed Operation Metro Surge. “We’re going to take them off the streets wholesale,” he said at a news conference. “It’s on. We won’t quit.”
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Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military to Minneapolis. It is the fifth major city to be targeted in Trump’s crackdown after he returned to office pledging the biggest deportation of undocumented migrants in history.
ICE deported hundreds of thousands of people in the first year of Trump’s second term and is poised to become the biggest law enforcement agency in the US. It received billions of dollars in new funding from Trump’s tax bill last summer and has carried out a huge recruitment drive.
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The agency has held careers fairs across the country, waived age restrictions and accelerated training to get agents onto the street as quickly as possible. That has prompted allegations that new recruits are unprepared for work in the field.
A court of appeals last week temporarily blocked an injunction that restricted aggressive tactics by federal immigration officers in Minnesota on the basis that it undermined their ability “to protect themselves and the public in very dangerous circumstances”. The injunction had prohibited agents from pepper-spraying, detaining or stopping peaceful observers of protests. The case was brought by community groups after many videos showed agents using pepper spray and non-lethal rounds at bystanders documenting arrests.
“You know they’re going to make mistakes,” Trump said after Good’s killing earlier this month. “Sometimes ICE is going to be too rough with somebody or, you know – they deal with rough people. They’re going to make a mistake. Sometimes it can happen terribly”
Trump had previously blamed Good for the shooting, accusing her of attempting to run over an ICE agent. But his view appeared to change after learning that Good’s father was a supporter of his. While still popular with Republicans, especially among Trump’s MAGA supporters, the campaign has provoked a fierce backlash in the Democrat-led cities where the raids are taking place.
Photograph by Brandon Bell/Getty Images